Aftertaste
by Foolscapping
Summary: Season 7 AU, Apocafic. "The sky is always black. Black and snowing gray — sooty, undesirable. The earth is brown-turned-soot with weeds and debris, and it coats their hands, smudges across their faces, camouflages Dean's freckles (or that's what he said his name was, anyway)."


**Author's Notes:** This is written for an anon on tumblr who wanted an amnesia fic! I wasn't sure how severe they wanted said amnesia, or if they wanted the situation to be more of a curtain!fic or what have you… if not anon, feel free to request more amnesia fics! This isn't beta'd. S7 AU. Not a lot of warnings other than APOCAFIIIIC.

* * *

The sky is always black. Black and snowing gray — sooty, undesirable. The earth is brown-turned-soot with weeds and debris, and it coats their hands, smudges across their faces, camouflages Dean's freckles (or that's what he said his name was, anyway). Sometimes as they travel from one safe-house to the next, Sam hears the distant sound of screaming and remembers, at the very least, that the world shouldn't be bubbling with miserable cries of pain, that the sky should be blue — so blue and bright, even if he couldn't comprehend how he'd _know_ that. There are a lot of things Sam doesn't know, really; things he _should_ , like what that fuzzy four-legged creature barking at them is, or what makes up the inside of his body, or what constitutes as food. Sometimes Sam clumsily adjusts the knife in his hands to try to remember the feeling of it there, because Dean had told him it was one of his finer skills. But the feeling… never really takes. It's like trying to pretend you're a surgeon in the middle of an operating room full of expectant nurses. He runs his hand over the body of a handgun while Dean reloads the clip itself, dismayed and how completely alien the cool steel is to him. It's not nearly as troubling as only knowing your brother for a few weeks, of only knowing his name and his relation to you. Not nearly as troubling as waking up to thunderous booms and echoes, to a fiery and tar world where people are running and bleeding and dying.

He's _terrified_. He stays behind Dean and grips his brother's arm tight, eyes wide, and he always scans the horizon — always waits for the shadows to catch up.

He's not sure what they are, and he's afraid to find out.

Dean explains it all to him, after letting the silence fester down in some basement in Oklahoma (that was supposed to be for tornadoes, Dean had said, and Sam had to bite his lip to avoid asking what such a thing even was). He explains that Sam had been… in a bad place, with his mind in shambles, and that Dean had genuinely been unsure if he'd ever even wake up from it. Before Sam had opened his eyes and staggered from the panic room, though, there had been chaos. Fire like biblical brimstone.

"Biblical?" Sam asks, afraid and hunkered down on a crate in the dark; Dean's so much calmer, and Sam isn't sure why. Sadder, Sam knows. He remembers what sadness looks like, in the backs of someone's eyes. He just doesn't have any faces to compare his brother's to, no one in memory that is anything more than a blurry outline fading into obscurity.

Dean looks up, shaking his head. "Biblical's just… not good. Trust me, Sammy."

"It's Sam," he replies, feeling oddly sure of himself. "You said I'm Sam."

"Right," Dean laughs — well, not laughs, but breathes it like he wants to laugh, wishes he could, but it's like the air is too busy rushing out to leave him hollow. "Anyway, _Sammy_ — It's not good. See, we, um… We had a friend. Stupid, idiotic sonofabitch, who thought he could… could take all this power into himself, to try and keep his people under control. But his feathery ass couldn't handle it, and… He. He was just gone. Flew himself over to some remote place in the ocean and — "

He makes an explosion with his hands, eyes downcast.

"Our friend's dead," Sam says quietly. He remembers relationships. Brother, father, mother, friend, lover. He remembers those things. It's like little plaques in his head, only the thing that had been sitting above each one was snatched away, leaving a big blank space. He'd carefully replaced Dean's face above one of those plaques. The others, though, are all frustratingly gone, like a thief had come in the night and ran off to somewhere nameless and timeless. Dean just nods without feeling the need to comment, tossing Sam a wet rag so that he could clean the ashy dust from his hands and face; his hair is greasy, hasn't been touched since he awoke. No time. They had been lucky that whatever is causing this took a long time to reach them.

Sam eats something called 'peaches' out of a can, and he really, really loves them. Around a mouth of whatever-peaches-are, he continues, "Who was this person? Our friend…?"

"Aw, Sam," Dean grumbles, leaning back against a makeshift — well, Sam can't remember the word, but it's something. It's soft. "Don't. Just — it's not important anymore."

Something about the way Dean says it annoys the fuck out of him. Not like he's ill-prepared to handle it, but because Dean's not willing to open up that vein, and it's not fucking fair because Sam can't remember anything that matters, nothing at all. Can't remember how to shoot a gun, couldn't remember monsters, couldn't remember spells. Oh, he remembers the word fuck, because apparently that's essential, so he can fucking get angry right — but now Dean's going to try to skirt around this? He shakes his head. "Don't you do that. I deserve to know about my friend that apparently blew up. You said before that someone messed up my head, right?"

"Yeah," Dean says, the lines of his face hard. "Yeah, someone _did_. His name was _Castiel_ , and he's the fucking stupid _infant_ that wrecked everything. He broke your brain and then broke himself and everything around him, and that's that. He's not important anymore, Sam. He's _gone_."

Sam slowly lowers himself next to Dean, staring up at the ceiling. He likes the aftertaste of canned peaches.

"He's important," Sam says quietly, sincerely. "He screwed up. But you cared about him. And I think I did, too, right? And now he's gone."

Dean doesn't seem to want to dignify that with a reply, so he just throws the soft warm thing over Sam's body, too, so he doesn't freeze to death or whatever. He tries to visualize it, tries to remember this 'Castiel' — his face, his clothes, the crinkle of his eyes that he probably has, since Dean has them, too. He tries to envision feathers, but he's not sure where they go. Ultimately, though, it all just slips through his ears like a cracked radiator, exhausting his engine. He's not sure why he knows what a radiator does. He's not sure where the metaphors are coming from.

"Did he hate me?" Sam nearly whispers. "I mean, he jacked up my head. He must've really hated me."

Dean closes his eyes, looks like he's counting to ten in silence. "No. I don't think he did. I think he was out of his goddamned mind, but I think he liked you, Sammy. Think he cared a lot about you."

It's sad, Sam thinks. It's sad that Dean cares about but hates this person, this guy that Sam will probably never remember. If he's honest, he's surprised to imagine that it's possible to both care about and utterly despise someone all in one breath. But the way Dean's eyes are haunted and the way Dean's hands clench and the way… the way he juts his jaw — Sam knows. It's possible. It's very possible. Sam pulls the soft warm thing up closer around these weird-ass flaps of skin on the sides of his face, closing his eyes and drifting. He sees things with his eyes shut: feathers and feathers and feathers, all in rows on skin and bone. Little beads all on a rope with a 't', falling into a full basin. A woman in a very long shirt, with blood on her stomach — no face, a slate, a name that is buried under many feet of mental strain. Crunchy food floating in white, cold water; a box with lines all over it, the name scribbled out. Colors like the rainbow, floating haphazardly; you eat those first. You empty the whole box of them, so that your faceless brother can scold you while your stomach twists and turns and churns.

He wakes up with a snap, glancing over at Dean as his brother starts to pack up what little is left of the supplies down here. Up above and far away, he hears cries for _mercy_. Whatever _mercy_ is.

Later, when they're hiking up a hill into another desolate town, Dean's arm bandaged and Sam's head wound dressed, they hide in a big shop and wait while Dean reloads his weapons and Sam stops shaking. Once the nagging fear (what was that, what was that creature, what were those sharp teeth in its head, why is Dean so calm, why is this happening, why did our friend leave us behind in this place) subsides, Sam breathes in a deep breath and finally feels his strange thumping inside his chest relax under Dean's hand. He pats his brother's fingers before they pull away to inventory what little is left of the hick mini-mart, while Sam's stomach gurgles. He swallows hard at the sensation, remembering the texture of rainbows crunching in his mouth, the sweetness of it dulled in memory like a made-up fantasy.

"You think they have Lucky Charms here?" Sam asks.

Dean wears his exhaustion now like a heavy coat in winter, but something about the question makes his eyes light up a little.

He waves a half-empty glass bottle of something brown and sloshy in his hand.

"Nah, but I know they've got booze. Hope you're ready to learn what whiskey tastes like."

As it turns out, Sam thinks later, spraying the floor with 'whiskey', he wasn't ready at all.


End file.
